smj wrote:I'm not suggesting there isn't a connection - who knows who read that post inside SGI and elsewhere?

Dodroid wrote:As for using the name in the mid 2000s though? You gotta wonder if someone at SGI read the comp.sys.sgi.hardware "Am I Dreaming?" post.

I'm sure *somebody* at SGI read it, I think many employees spent a few idle minutes in the various comp.sys.sgi.* groups, just like Sun, DEC, HP employees, and others. Which is why I didn't say anything foolish like, "That's unpossible!"

It could be that Casey Leedom was playing with an idea and recalled the old customer wish/post, and grabbed the name. It could be he independently came up with the term. Maybe it was a standing in-house joke post-1994 and every initial new product pitch went through a "Banana 2000" phase before it got it's own code name.

Maybe a(nother) helpful ex-SGI employee will run across this thread one day and share an enlightening story...

Hopefully someday. Thankfully, unlike Reddit, Nekochan doesn't lock threads after 6 months, meaning that old ones can still be replied to forever and some of the most popular threads are years old but still relevant.

I doubt the name "Banana 2000" was applied to everything, as something like the Origin2000 bears little resemblance to the idea for a simple, low end SGI put forward in the 1994 post. It does, however, make sense to me that a cheap SGI built with Nvidia graphics might be named after an idea that also suggested lowering the cost of an SGI system using PC components.

Quick followup to clarify: the person who supplied the info I've posted in the past was someone who worked at SGI and was present at the meeting with Casey when management killed the project. From what he said, Casey had some excellent ideas but management just wasn't interested; by that time they had a lot of anti-MIPS/IRIX people in the company.

Ian.

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